Category: Poetry

We do our best to escape
the shadow of the wreath.
            Nothin’ but a losin’ battle.

Our hearts we dye in grey,
with fate we stain and streak.
            Colors of imbalance.

Death is a lengthy day
that all will fully know.
The end will come before
or after
in the moon or through the sea.

We do our best to escape
the shadow of the wreath.

– Lance Mazmanian

Author’s Note: This poem was written with a nod toward the October 1987 song “History Will Teach Us Nothing” by Sting (aka Gordon Sumner). No real relation apart from rhythm.…

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            —november

a year ago this morning
as orange oak leaves drifted
from branch to ground
i was making love
                        not knowing

a year ago midday
i showered and went
to work, warmed against
crackling frost palming
the window glass
                        not knowing

a year ago 12:34 p.m.
i missed the call

a year ago 12:37 p.m.
inoperable brain bleed—
i barely heard through
the barking of six dogs.
dad held the phone to your mouth.
your last garbled words—
go inventory your dogs

a year ago 1:21 p.m.
i hurled my duffel into
the car i’d put 15,000
miles on that year
                        crying at least 8,000

drove past november
trees, lawn stippled red,
brown, fragrant black
                        knowing

it was the last time i
would see home this way

that when i returned
rainbow leaves would
be rotting muck
winter hanging heavy
on the garden fence

cemetery ground too frozen
to bury anything
as alive as

sorrow

– Megan Peralta…

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She swims in Winnipesaukee to capture loons
    on film.  Their oily feathers are black and white.
A squall disrupts the summer afternoon.

When heavy rain clouds burst like water balloons,
    New Hampshire’s favorite fowl disperse in flight.
Why visit Winnipesaukee?  To capture loons

on film requires a telescopic lens.
    Lightning and thunder explode like dynamite
when squalls disrupt the summer afternoons.

Her hopes for perfect pictures lie in ruins.
    She works so hard to photograph the sight
of Winnipesaukee’s elusive flocks of loons.

Their call resembles the sound of contrabassoons
    tuning for a symphony at night.
Summer squalls disrupt the afternoons

when eager scouts arrive at camp in June.
    Buying postcards is for hypocrites!
She drinks to Winnipesaukee to toast the loons,
but squanders her dreams in cheap saloons.…

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I am a collection, fragile, fine,
A glass menagerie, smooth, divine.
Each curve and edge, a story told,
Of strength in fire, of spirit bold.
Some days I stand, unshaken, tall,
A crystal fortress, never to fall.
The world admires my gleaming light,
Unaware I tremble in the night.
For glass can bear the weight of years,
Yet shatter soft in silent fears.
A breath too harsh, a touch unkind,
And fractures creep through soul and mind.
But oh, how beauty lies within
The way the light plays on my skin.
Each crack a map of where I’ve been,
Each flaw a proof: I’m ‘living’ glass.
So see me strong, yet handle rare,
For I am crafted thin as air.
A sculpture spun from joy and pain
Both unbreakable… and breakable, the same.…

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my fingertips comb the hairs on your thigh,
an evergreen flesh; my lips press upon your chest,
but i must ask,              is this what you need?

my bare shoulder intercepts your blossoming
kiss, and i fear my nakedness offends your loss,
but you insist                          this is what you need.

you aim to forget, for a lustful moment,
how you watched his chest wilt and crumple,
but i still think,                                   is this what you need?

your family members rip dozens of peduncles
from the soil to place in your hand, but you say
that something dead                     is not what you need. 

will my hands, my tongue, my red canna expel
the pathogens from a mind you yourself call warped?
you told me,             this is what you need.…

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The palm reader, garbed in a cascaded Romani dress,
red headscarf & golden hoop earrings, took my tired

hands in hers. She whispered, my dress suggests I am
pure, I’m free of illusion &, with your spirit-trust, I’ll see the

trails leading into you. Into all you hide from. I’d found
her accidently, off an old road w/ moss-tongued trees

& a few junked cars, rundown & lost. Two dogs, their
soiled faces peering through fence slots, & a wet garden

of vegetables hard-hit by nibbling rabbits & whitetail deer.
I was a man of blackened branches, looking for what

might have moved in me, had I willed it or wished it so.
She leaned close to me, felt the flexure lines of my hand,

those deltas of tension – longing, remorse, yearning, hurt –
& said that the hand is an un-funneled richness until we,

w/ in a life, create paths upon it that our imagination –
as a genie – creates its freedom & its hard bondage in,

&, by & by, we arrive at it, this truth, like a stunned doe.…

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The night never asked permission
to swallow her whole,
my mother, with her frayed nerve endings
and shattered mirrors for eyes,
her mind a house with too many doors,
each one opening to a different self,
a different terror.
I learned silence from her trembling hands,
how love could twist into something sharp,
how the woman who gave me life
could look through me like a stranger
on a crowded street.
Pain is not a lesson,
it’s the first language you forget
but your body remembers:
the hollow where safety should be,
the silence after the scream,
the way your ribs ache
from holding so much alone.
They never tell you
how lonely healing can be
how you’ll trace your scars
like a map to places
that no longer exist,
how you’ll miss the monsters
because at least they were familiar.…

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